


Hail from old water

by deadendtracks (amonitrate)



Series: Idiot Prayer [2]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Capital Punishment, Drinking, Emetophobia, Guilt, Hiding Medical Issues, M/M, Missing Scene, Post-Season/Series 03, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Seizures, Smoking, Sort Of, i mean it's tommy and alfie so there's more guns than comfort, implied suicidal ideation, medical noncompliance?, not sure how to warn for that one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-25 06:07:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17719571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amonitrate/pseuds/deadendtracks
Summary: “Guess more came of that smashed vase than just the spectacles, huh, mate.” Alfie sounded more casually curious than concerned, like Tommy seized in front of him on a regular basis.While he tries to distract himself from the imminent execution of his family, Tommy's head injury proves to have further consequences.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks again to @veneredirimmel for beta!

He’d told himself it wouldn’t happen again. It did.

In Camden Town at a fucking boxing match with Alfie Solomons, close enough to the ring to smell the sweat of the two men beating the hell out of each other, and for the first time he’d recognized the feeling coming on with enough warning to get somewhere quiet before it hit. So he’d risen from his rickety wood chair and he’d made it as far as the men’s room and woken to Solomons standing over him, a perplexed frown on his face. Then Alfie had squatted down, groaning a little, and poked Tommy’s chest with the tip of his cane.

“So, you’re not dead,” Alfie said, then pushed himself up with the cane to loom over him again. “I suppose that’s the good news. For both of us, see, because getting rid of the body of one’s business associate in such a public place is a young man’s game.”

He’d pissed himself this time, but Alfie hadn’t said anything about that. Maybe that was the bad news.

“You’ll have to sleep soon, yeah?” was all Alfie said, when Tommy finally got himself off the floor. He hadn’t asked for help and Alfie hadn’t offered, just watched him use a nearby porcelain sink to pull himself vertical.

“Yeah,” Tommy managed, the word thick in his mouth. He didn’t ask how Alfie knew. Given the state of his head he wouldn’t have been able to follow what was bound to be a tangled explanation anyway.

“Guess more came of that smashed vase than just the spectacles, huh, mate.” Alfie sounded more casually curious than concerned, like Tommy seized in front of him on a regular basis. “Posh lad such as yourself, probably got a room at the Ritz, right?”

No, but his hotel was across town and there was no way he was going to be able to drive himself, and if he had to take a taxi that distance he’d probably embarrass himself further by vomiting.

“Yeah, the Ritz is a mite stodgy for you, innit. And the Berkeley, now my guess is that’s too noisy, the Berkeley is full of flappers since the war. So depending on your mood when you booked it, that leaves the Carlton or the Savoy. But the real question, Tommy, is whether your plans for the rest of the evening include giving some other poor bloke a shock in a public lavatory.”

It took him what felt like ages to wade through the words, to make sense of them. “Not if I can help it,” he said finally. For the record, he was staying at the Savoy, but he wasn’t about to give Alfie the satisfaction of confirming his guess.

Three times was a pattern. Months had passed between the first two episodes, but this time it had only been three weeks. He thought maybe this was Alfie’s roundabout way of asking if it was going to happen again tonight, but twice in one night would be a little much even for him, though that wasn’t taking into account his luck when it came to his physical condition while in Alfie Solomons’ presence. Three times was a pattern there, too. It was no wonder Alfie had made a hobby of double crossing him, he must seem an easy mark.

“Right.” Alfie had clapped his hands then, as if they’d made a deal. And before he knew it he was in the back of a car driven by one of Alfie’s men, and Alfie had climbed in beside him. He must have looked as nauseated as he felt, because Alfie turned to him as the engine started. “You lose whatever unkosher slop you’ve eaten today in this car, Thomas, I will bill you for a replacement.”

Tommy hadn’t answered. He’d been asleep before they pulled away from the curb.

* * *

What he later figured must have been the first time, he’d come to on the floor of the nursery with Charlie screaming beside him, near hysteria. He couldn’t have been out long because Frances was just knocking on the door. She’d had to help him sit up and Charlie was bruised where Tommy had dropped him and from the look on her face he could tell she thought he’d been drinking, but he hadn’t.

He hadn’t.

* * *

He woke with a start on a musty couch and he had no idea where he was or how he’d gotten there, and then recognition of the where finally came -- Alfie Solomon’s cave of an office -- but the rest remained stubbornly blank.

“Me and Ollie, we had a bet.”

Tommy raised his head and dragged himself upright at the voice, which was Alfie himself, of course, sitting behind his desk reading what looked like it might be a tattered penny dreadful. He found his glasses in his jacket pocket and slipped them on so he could read the title: _The Black Band, or, The Mysteries of Midnight_.

Alfie went on without looking up from his book. “I said five pounds you’d last three hours. Ollie said morning.”

There was no way to tell daylight from midnight in the bowels of the distillery. “So who won?” Tommy asked.

“Hmm,” Alfie said. When he took out his pocket watch Tommy realized he could have done the same. The seizures fucked with his head, made it hard to think things through, after. “Well, it’s been five hours, in fact, but it’s only two am, so I think that makes me the victor.”

“Not sure the terms of that wager were fair.” Sleep had done nothing to ease the whole-body ache, though his head was marginally clearer. He still reeked of his own urine, dried now, which was an experience he hadn’t had since the trenches and wasn’t one he’d missed.

“Wasn’t a fixed race, was it, so it was a fairer bet than most. Fairer than a wager at any of your tracks, mate,” Alfie said. He’d taken the whole thing in stride, Alfie. There wasn’t much that happened to the human body that surprised you after you held your first set of intestines in your hands while artillery shells screamed over your head. Tommy suspected Alfie knew the feeling. “There’s a washroom just to the left as you head down the hall. It’s not much, but it’s got a sink.  Or…” Stroking his beard, Alfie ran suddenly and uncharacteristically short of words. Tommy waited him out. “Well, I do have a house, right. It’s not like I live here.”

“You have a house,” Tommy echoed.

“Well, yeah.” For the first time, Alfie looked unsettled. Tommy had passed out on the grimy floor of the men’s room and pissed himself while in the midst of a fit, then passed out again in the man’s car and for all he knew been carried bodily into this office to pass out for a third time on the fucking couch for five hours, but this was where things got strained? “Did you think you was the only one?”

“The only what?” He was far too tired for what was required of him in a conversation with Alfie.

Alfie set aside his book, staring down his nose at Tommy as if only now it had occurred to him that Tommy’s head might not be screwed on right. “The only one’s got a house, Tommy.”

There didn’t seem to be an answer to that. Tommy had never given where Alfie Solomons resided any thought at all.

* * *

Two months after the incident in the nursery he’d heard her voice and then the next thing he knew there were faces hovering over him he hadn’t recognized, equal parts concerned horror and something close to revulsion in them, and they were talking to him but at first their mouths moved soundlessly and then they were saying his name, Mr. Shelby, Mr. Shelby, and he was so tired and he hurt all over and on his recently and greatly expanded scale of pain it was somewhere in the middle, closest to how he’d felt after the thrashing Sabini’s men had given him. Another minute and he recognized his room at the Midland and then a bit later the hotel manager and the lovely face of Teresa, who Billy must have sent to him, but he didn’t remember anything of the sort. He didn’t remember anything after leaving the factory that afternoon.

A fit, he got out of them, when he was finally able to pull himself up off the floor with the manager’s assistance and limp to the bed. There was blood in his mouth where he’d bit his tongue. They insisted on calling a doctor and he couldn’t do much to stop them and he’d fallen asleep before the doctor even arrived and then hadn’t remembered why they’d called the man when they woke him again. The doctor was discreet enough to kick everyone out of the room before insisting on an examination. Out of sorts enough to be honest, Tommy had admitted to the six months of headaches and when pressed admitted to their cause, and he hadn’t liked the way that had sharpened the man’s gaze.

The doctor had served in France. Seizures were common enough after a head injury of the severity Tommy had described, he said. Could be just this one time or could be the start of a chronic condition, there was no way to know, but he should see his own doctor as soon as possible.

It wasn’t until the man had left that Tommy realized he wasn’t wearing any clothes. 

* * *

“We can’t all live in country manors like lords, now, can we,” was what Alfie said as he ushered Tommy inside the row house he apparently lived in, a few blocks from the distillery.

“Suppose not,” Tommy answered automatically. The muscles of his thighs were trembling, already exhausted after the short walk.

“Not much of a conversationalist after one of these fits, are you?” Alfie didn’t seem to expect a response so Tommy didn’t bother to find one. “Not that you’re a fountain of words otherwise.”

The house was nearly identical to Ada’s in layout and size, but a little old fashioned in decor. Not the abode of a bohemian, this. More the tastes of a government clerk, which led Tommy to wonder how much time Solomons actually spent in the place and if he’d just bought it furnished and never bothered to change anything. Cluttered as it was, the office at the distillery suited him more.

Alfie caught him staring up the staircase with dread. “Yeah, not much to be done about that. Come on.”

Half afraid his legs were going to give out under him the way they had at Ada’s, Tommy tried not to lean too obviously on the railing and pulled himself up after Alfie.

“Your whole family still in the clink?” Alfie asked idly as he waited on the landing for Tommy to catch up.

Tommy didn’t have the breath or wits to formulate any kind of response to that but the bare truth. “Yeah.” The looming execution date was, in fact, the reason he’d come to London in the first place, and judging by the question Solomons had figured this out. If he hadn’t been ready to drop where he stood the idle mention of the situation would have worried Tommy more.

“Hmm. Alright, well, here you are.” Alfie flicked a light on. “If it’s up to your aristocratic fucking standards, the room across the hall is available. There’s things in the wardrobe might fit you.”

Tommy just stood there, peering blearily through the doorway at the neat white tiles of Alfie Solomons’ bathroom. “And where will you be?”

Again that look, like maybe Alfie had discovered he’d been working with a madman all this time without realizing. “It’s three o’clock in the morning, innit. I’ll be in bed.”

Alfie waited until Tommy had shut himself in and then he heard the tap of the cane as the other man retreated down the hallway. He hadn’t told Tommy which of the other doors belonged to his own bedroom.

There was a large porcelain tub but Tommy was certain if he got in the thing he’d never get out again, and that would be one indignity too far, wouldn’t it, to be discovered naked stuck in a bathtub by Alfie Solomons. So he found a washcloth and soap and gave himself a quick sponge bath from the sink, reminiscent of mornings at Watery Lane, except here the water was hot and he hadn't had to fetch it in a pitcher first. Alfie had cotton towels the size of bed sheets so when he was clean Tommy wrapped one around his waist and scooped up his soiled clothing and opened the door.

The hall was dark and all the heavy oak doors that lined it shut and Tommy wondered if Alfie had really gone to sleep in one of those rooms. Maybe he had bolts on the doors. The last time they’d seen each other in person, Tommy had stuck a gun in his face, after all.

Neither of them had mentioned it since.

Tommy hadn’t thought to shut the curtains in the room before he fell into the bed so  when he woke four hours later the sun was in his eyes, which didn’t do much for the headache that was mustering forces for an eventual ambush. He’d left his clothes in a pile on a nearby chair, and though his shirt and jacket were only rumpled, his trousers needed laundering. Despite the smell they were just a little stiffened and were free of lice, and he’d certainly worn worse for far longer than the drive from London back to Birmingham. He dug his flask out of his jacket pocket and sat on the bed and chased the memory with a gulp of whiskey and stopped himself from checking the seams of his clothing for bugs.

He’d certainly worn worse but he didn’t have to now, did he. That was the bloody point of being back.

So he tried the wardrobe Alfie had mentioned and found a couple of complete suits hanging inside. Black, like everything Alfie wore, but cut for a taller man -- Tommy would have to roll the cuffs. Hell. It wasn’t like anything had fit him during the war, either.

Tommy made do with a borrowed pair of trousers and his own clothes and Alfie failed to comment on the drama of the previous evening until he’d called for one of his men to drive them back to Tommy’s own car.

“I’ll include the clothes on the next invoice, mate,” Alfie told him.

Tommy hadn’t been sure it was a joke.

* * *

A fortnight after Camden Town and he’d been too wrapped up in work to heed the newly familiar warning signs and it had happened in his fucking office, in front of Lizzie, and he’d bashed his temple on his desk on the way down. There’d apparently been a lot of blood.

He came back to himself in the ambulance and that had been bad. There’d been blood sticky on his face and his head hurt and he’d gotten dislodged in time. When he fought them they strapped him down to the gurney and stuck him with something that knocked him out again before he got to the hospital.

Injury-induced epilepsy. Exacerbated by stress and lack of sleep and drinking, the doctor said. Given the accelerating frequency of the seizures it’d be best if he checked himself into a clinic until they were under control.

It was weeks until the appeal, and then everyone was due to hang.

So they’d sent him home with a prescription but even at the lowest dose a fog settled over him he couldn’t work through.

“You’re not taking it, are you?” Lizzie had demanded three days after he’d got out of the hospital, standing in front of his desk with her arms folded over her chest and her jaw tight.

He didn’t ask how she even knew about the fucking drugs. He just glared back at her, but it was hard to maintain any level of intimidation with someone who had recently witnessed you lose all control of your faculties.

“Tommy--” Lizzie sighed, biting her lip. “Fuck if I’m going to watch that happen again. I’ll quit, I promise you.”

When he still didn’t react, she pulled out the stops. “Lot of good it will do them if you go into a fucking fit while in one of those meetings I’m not supposed to know about, with some agent for the bloody Crown.”

He’d had to look away at that. Lizzie sank into one of the chairs in front of his desk, her voice gone softer. “I know you’re worried about the appeal. I know. But if you don’t start taking your medication, I will call Ada and tell her what’s happened.”

He wasn’t sure Ada would give a damn at this point, but Lizzie’s other argument was a sound one. So he learned that if he took the Luminal at night the fog thinned enough by mid morning to allow thought to break through, and until it did he took care to limit himself to routine matters. Another week and the appeal date rushing up to meet them and he’d passed out in his study at home but it hadn’t gone into convulsions, so he supposed that meant the fucking medicine was doing something. He’d had to tell Frances about it so she wouldn’t call an ambulance on him, though. So now besides Lizzie and Teresa and the manager of the Midland and bloody Alfie Solomons, his housekeeper knew as well. How long until the whole of fucking Britain knew about his affliction?


	2. Chapter 2

After the arrests he’d nearly taken up a second residence in London, badgering barristers and working steadily at wearing down MPs. Ada had put off the move to Boston because of the trial and he’d stayed at her place the first time, but it had been stilted and she wasn’t really speaking to him, so after that he got a suite at a hotel. Not the Ritz, but impressive enough, should he need to impress. And since business didn’t stop for the sake of four condemned Brummie gangsters, he’d taken a meeting with Solomons, and that had led to the occasional boxing match when he was in the city. Solomons trying to convince him to back a fighter, he probing Solomons about the mechanics of running a distillery. It was all idle talk to keep his mind engaged on something besides the obvious, the dark unstoppable clockwork that took up most of his energy even when he ran out of angles to pursue. Especially then.

He spent weekends with Charlie in Warwickshire and the early part of the week at  the office in Birmingham and inevitably ended up in London by Wednesday or Thursday. It had been a Thursday when he’d had the full blown fucking seizure in front of Solomons, and he’d stayed away from Camden Town for a month afterwards, until Solomons sent a telegram asking if he was ever going to return the trousers he’d borrowed.

He’d used more words than that, though.

So, another boxing match. According to his doctor he wasn’t supposed to drink anymore but he’d ended up a little drunk. Not enough that most people would have noticed, but of course, of fucking course, Alfie Solomons did, because Alfie Solomons didn’t fucking drink at all, did he? Underneath his bluster and speechifying, Solomons didn’t miss much.

After the fight had ended they’d come to a companionable stop on the street corner outside the arena, the departing crowd flowing around them, and Alfie had continued  the elaborate tangent about bread he’d started while the boxers had still been pummelling each other. Tommy was only half listening.

“Bread and rum both eat yeast, right? Same shit makes dough rise gets you rum. Yeast, yeast is an animal which needs sugar, so grapes are good, yeah, and that gets you wine, and if you distill wine you find yourself with brandy. Your friends the Russians, they like their vodka, and you can use potatoes for that shit. Add some juniper to your fermented potato and you have gin, which is big in America these days, I hear. Now beer and whiskey take grain. And barley, it got us civilization’s first booze. The ancients knew about barley.”

Tommy just nodded at the first pause in the oration. He felt loose and almost good in a way he hadn’t in months.

“Barley is what you want for whiskey,” Alfie went on. “And you can grind barley to make bread, right, so you, my friend, have been partaking of a liquified form of what might otherwise have been sustenance.”

“Hmm,” Tommy agreed. He was just drunk enough to have been lulled into not quite following the turn in Alfie’s digression. Bad plan, all around.

“Yeah, whiskey.” Alfie’s attention had sharpened on him. “Rum’s better for boxing. Whiskey’s for serious business, which, I note, has been lacking tonight, mate. And good thing it was, because you only had a couple of drinks that I saw and you being Tommy Shelby and therefore usually possessing something of a Spartan demeanor, it’s a bit hard to judge, but my guess is you might be pretty drunk by now.”

The corner of Tommy’s mouth lifted, settling somewhere between amused and  suspicious. “If you’ve taken up prohibitionism, won’t the rum business become awkward? Or are you looking to sell?”

Alfie ignored him. “You, Thomas Shelby, most self-made of Birmingham’s self-made men, took a train down here to my fair city and now you’ve hired some bloke to ferry you around. So whatever they’ve got you on, you’re not supposed to drive.”

Fuck.

He’d needed something to distract himself from the consequences of his unending cascade of failures so he’d started buying factories, then the neighborhoods around them, and conveniently enough the fact that the medication prevented him from safely driving was masked by the pretense that a chauffeur fit his new expansion into legitimate industry. No one batted an eye at the Midland, just brought word to him his car was waiting for him, like he was some kind of lesser lord.

But apparently the affectation hadn’t fooled Alfie.

Tommy pulled out his cigarette case and popped it open. “What’s your point,” he said finally, after lighting up and taking a long drag.

“My point is spirits, right, and phenobarbital, they are a bad combination.” Alfie had braced his hands on his cane, staring Tommy down. “And given how hard you’ve been working to stop your family from meeting their maker, I suspect this isn’t the best time for idle indulgence of that little death wish they sent us all back from France with, now is it?”

Jesus Christ.

“What’s your fucking _point_?” he repeated, edging towards belligerent, the weight of his gun in its holster under his coat solid and loaded and ready for his hand.

“If you’re fucking dead I won’t have anyone to ship my fucking rum, will I, since everyone that could have taken over your operation with any competence is waiting to be fucking hanged.”

“So this is a business concern, eh?”

Alfie leveled him with a stare. “Yeah, mate, it is.”

A short, scornful laugh broke free of him. “I’m not going to die.”

“You drink any more than you have already and take something like Luminal tonight and yes, Tommy, you just might stop fucking breathing.” Alfie wasn’t laughing. Alfie was fucking serious.

Even on his best day, which this most definitely was not, Tommy didn’t think he had what it took to navigate Alfie Solomons apparently concerned about the state of his bloody health, and he didn’t fucking trust what Solomons meant to do with any more information than he’d already gathered.

“I’m not going to stop breathing.”

“You going to stop drinking, then?”

He didn’t have a good answer for that.

“So. Unless you’re going to hire a girl to sit there all night and make sure your lungs keep working, what’s your plan?”

He didn’t have a plan. All of his plans were coming to shit right now and he was running out of time, which was probably why he’d been drinking against doctor’s orders in the first place. And Alfie wasn’t wrong, he hadn’t had that much yet, but it had crept up on him until he already felt like he’d finished off half a bottle.

“Won’t take it tonight, then,” he said, immediately realizing he’d let slip something he hadn’t wanted to reveal.

Alfie blinked at him. “That’s not how it works. It--” he broke off as his car pulled up to the curb. “Nevermind. Alright, get in.”

And just like that, he had flicked the butt of his cigarette into the gutter and climbed into Alfie’s car again. He didn’t pass out this time. He did think to wonder why it was Alfie never drove himself; even thought about asking him. Doubted he’d get an answer that meant anything.

The lights outside the car smeared together and forced Tommy’s eyes closed. And that was no good, because he kept thinking of the metal hell he’d been screwed into after Hughes’ men had cracked his skull. The hard unnatural pressure of it on his skin, the way he couldn’t move, captive to whoever came to sit by his bed and whatever they wanted to say to him. If it had happened now, Lizzie might come, but--

Tommy found himself talking to shut off his own thoughts. “I was in the hospital.”

Hell, he was more drunk than he’d realized. He didn’t want to talk about the halo, he wanted to stop feeling the pins against his skull. He shook his head -- was able to shake his head, because the bloody halo had been nine months ago -- and then more words bolted out of him heedless as a horse cooped up in a truck too long, taking the first chance at escape.

“They wanted me to check myself into a clinic.” Fucking hell. What had happened to not giving Solomons more ammunition with which to eventually fuck him over again?

“Yeah, I figured.” Then at Tommy’s stare, Alfie gestured towards his head. “You still got stitches, don’t you.”

He reached up and fingered the stitches in his forehead from where he’d hit the desk. He’d forgotten they were there. Should have been taken out by now, he suspected.

“Missed your calling,” Tommy said. He’d had a bit more than the three whiskeys Alfie had seen at the boxing ring, just a few swigs from his flask here and there, but things had gotten blurry on him, inside and out. Which probably was the fucking medicine, then. “Shoulda been a police inspector.”

Alfie just scoffed. Insulted, maybe.

So, Alfie Solomons’ row house again. It wasn’t late, not even midnight, and Tommy was beginning to feel sick. He hadn’t drank this much in one sitting since he’d started the Luminal and it had been a stupid thing to do given the company. He missed a step climbing down from the car and caught himself with a jolt and looked up to find Alfie watching him, expressionless.

“Why do you give a fuck about any of this?” he demanded as Alfie led him into a rather cramped sitting room. It was too bald a question. He could blame the booze but he hadn’t had that much, he bloody hadn’t.

“Too much bother to find another distributor after all the shit you put me through, last couple of years.”

“The shit I put you through?” Tommy started laughing and for a moment thought maybe he wouldn’t be able to stop.

“Yeah.” Alfie took off his hat and stood there in the center of his fussy sitting room that looked like maybe someone’s grandmother had decorated it and if Tommy hadn’t been more drunk than he fucking should have been he would have thought the other man’s face was lined with something close to worry.

“Alfie, you’ve stabbed me in the back, twice,” Tommy said. “Got my brother arrested. Got my--” He slammed full speed into the wall that was the tunnel and the priest and Charlie.

When he didn’t say anything more, Alfie just shrugged. “Well. None of that was personal, was it.”

He supposed not. The curious thing was, the more drunk Tommy felt the less words Alfie used, and he had no idea what to make of that. It seemed a bad omen.

“What you need right now, Tommy, is coffee.” Tommy frowned in disgust and Alfie ignored him. “Yep, strong coffee. Luckily for you, I have some on hand for just such an occasion as this.”

With that he left Tommy where he was and disappeared into the depths of his house.

It was fucking quiet, Alfie’s house. There didn’t seem to be a housekeeper or any other staff, and the silence ate at Tommy the way it always did these days. He didn’t know what the hell he was even doing here, except that if he’d gone back to his hotel alone tonight he would have kept drinking and no one could afford for him to stop fucking breathing right now. Which was his doing to begin with, wasn’t it. Every month that went by since the arrests was another tonne of earth over their heads and he didn’t know anymore whether he was digging them out or burying them. Dying in his sleep because he couldn’t stop the bloody drinking would be too easy an escape.

Alfie appeared with a tray and the bitter smell of the coffee turned his stomach.

“Yeah,” Alfie said at the look on his face. “Drink it anyway, mate, trust me.”

Trust him. Right.

Alfie set the coffee service on a squat table and leaned on his cane, lowering himself down onto the couch with a weary huff. Tommy took a nearby armchair but the moment he was still he lost his bearings altogether, sank into deep mud. He gripped the arms of the chair, sinking, sinking--

“Tommy.”

His head jerked up and he blinked at Alfie. Jesus. He sat forward and fumbled with the tall, worked silver coffee pot, and very carefully poured himself a cup. Dumped in cream and sugar, but it did nothing for the flavor. After he’d taken a few sips Alfie poured himself a cup and asked him about the October sale at Newmarket.

“Old news,” Tommy dismissed.

“Well, talking is a good way to keep yourself awake, innit, and keeping awake until you’ve sobered up some is the goal here, so humor me.”

Tommy shrugged. He hadn’t been able to concentrate at the October sale. He’d bought a yearling at auction and paid too much for it.

“You getting into breeding stock? That sale’s coming up, right, in December?”

Zero Hour was coming up. If they all hanged, what would he want with another bloody horse.

“I don’t want to fucking talk about horses,” he said. What he wanted was to finish off the flask in his pocket. He drained his cup of coffee instead. Poured himself another and left it black.

“When’s your family up for appeal, then?”

Tommy set his cup down on the saucer to free his hands. Saw himself take out his gun and shove it between Alfie’s eyes, but stopped his hand as it closed around the weapon in its holster.

“Alright,” Alfie said mildly. “I’ll take that to mean it’s soon.”

Turned out rage burned away the stupor he’d been falling into just as well as the caffeine.

Tommy let his hand drop from under his jacket and drank his second cup of coffee and Alfie didn’t ask him any more fucking questions. Eventually he must have seemed sober enough for Alfie to deem him safe to sleep on his own, so he took the room he’d stayed in the last time. He sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, his gun in his hands, the flask burning a hole in his pocket, before he set them both aside and tried to sleep.

* * *

Maybe Alfie had been right and he did have a death wish. Because the first time they fucked was the next morning, and by then Tommy was sober and more clear-headed than he’d been since he’d started taking his fucking medicine regularly, so he hadn’t had any kind of excuse.

It seemed the only time Alfie shut his bloody mouth was when Tommy’s hand was on his cock, and that had been how it’d started, Tommy wanting to stop his incessant talking for once. Just to see if he could. To see if he could shock Alfie Solomons into silence. Alfie rendered speechless had only happened one other time before, when Tommy had thrown Charlie into his face, and that wasn’t anything Tommy was looking to repeat. But he had other tactics.

He’d been stuck for hours in the overstuffed armchair in Alfie’s sitting room reading one of his god awful dime novels, because he’d woken at five in the morning, apparently well before Alfie himself rose for the day, and it had been the only thing he could find to occupy his time without venturing further into Alfie’s territory than he wanted to go. Fiction had stopped making much sense to him after the war and this could barely be called a proper book at all, but it was better than being left alone with his thoughts.

After Alfie descended from the upper floor he’d spent ten minutes standing over Tommy’s chair taking the most circuitous verbal route possible to explain he’d called a car to take Tommy back to his hotel and Tommy had been too tired to listen and had woken on the wrong side of reckless and so he’d just done it. Leaned right into Alfie’s space and slid his hand up the inside of Alfie’s thigh. And Alfie hadn’t tried to kill him for it. Instead, it had gotten him the desired result: Alfie Solomons had fallen silent. Then Alfie had started unbuttoning his trousers.

Of course, later Tommy realized he could have used the phone in the hall and called himself a car and left well before Alfie had come down the stairs.


	3. Chapter 3

He told himself it wouldn’t happen again.

He and fucking Alfie Solomons. He and Alfie Solomons fucking.

Talk about death wishes.

* * *

His family didn’t hang, but it was a near thing.

Christmas came and went. Michael returned to the company. Arthur and John and Polly didn’t. Ada sailed to Boston before New Years.

Then Tommy was faced with the fact that he couldn’t stop drinking even after they were released and everyone was safe again, and since he didn’t actually want to die in his sleep something had to give, and what gave was the Luminal. He hadn’t had a seizure in four months. He was careful. Kept the driver, kept himself aware of the signs, tried to sleep and eat on something close to a reasonable schedule, tried to cut back the booze, and nothing happened. Maybe he convinced himself nothing would. Maybe it was just a matter of choosing among an array of risks, none of which he had much control over anyhow. It was the kind of uncertain ground he was used to occupying.

He certainly had control over who he slept with, so he stuck with the girls at the Midland. If the worst happened the manager already knew about it, so it wouldn’t be a surprise and the staff had proven discreet. So he created a full routine for himself and it kept him from thinking about much else.

He had less reason to go to London, now. He went anyway.

* * *

The enclosed noise and press of the crowds at boxing matches tended to put him on edge and though he could tolerate it, he preferred the races. Alfie didn’t particularly enjoy the track but he’d agree if Tommy suggested it. Neither of them ever placed a bet but Tommy still got something out of going, even if he always knew who was slated to win in the end. It restored him, watching the horses run. He’d had to give up riding back when he’d still been taking the Luminal and he hadn’t been in the saddle since, even after he’d stopped. Part of his strategy of risk reduction.

He wasn’t sure what part of that strategy involved fucking Alfie Solomons.

So he went down to London a couple of times a month and more often than not he and Alfie ended up together, usually in Alfie’s bed. By now Tommy knew which door belonged to Alfie’s bedroom -- the second on the left -- but if he was there late enough afterwards he took the room he’d stayed in that first night. Neither of them were easy sleepers.

He didn’t know why he was doing it. He didn’t know why Alfie was. Alfie didn’t need anything from him but a means to smuggle his rum and a show of force should Sabini get restless and maybe that was it. They didn’t talk about it, just as they didn’t talk about the times Alfie had fucked him in a less biblical sense. It just happened.

Was still happening.

It had become part of his routine, truth be told.

And then gripping the solid oak of Alfie’s headboard something had split apart and he’d heard his name, heard Grace’s voice calling his name. He’d ignored it because Alfie’s cock had been in him and Alfie’s fingers were in his mouth and he couldn’t think of Grace while Alfie Solomons fucked into him slow and steady and still remain sane. His body felt fully alive for the first time in a long time and _fuck_ , he came, shaking, Alfie panting hot in his ear as he followed.

Tommy floated a little in the aftermath, flushed and sweaty and briefly real, Alfie’s hand in his hair, Alfie draped solidly over him, weighing him down, anchoring him into himself. And it had felt like they’d done this before, which they had, but not this exact moment, this moment that felt like an echo, and

 

someone was muttering somewhere behind him. “Fucking hell, Tommy. Fuck.”

and

 

then

 

“Are you going to be sick?”

Was he?

“Tommy, if you’re going to be sick, you need to-- fuck.”

Tommy’s body was making decisions without him because something shifted inside him and filled his throat and he was choking and then he was rolled onto his side, coughing. When he was empty, hands eased him away from the mess he’d left. He couldn’t move. He

 

woke up somewhere else. Lying on his side again, his head pounding.

“Right, I need you to talk to me now, because if you can’t do that I am calling a fucking ambulance.”

Tommy swallowed. His mouth tasted sour and he could barely move, like he’d taken a beating. Recognition came slowly. Bed. Window. Wardrobe, the wardrobe was familiar. He lifted his head a little, bleary. In a chair pulled up next to the bed perched Alfie Solomons, naked.

“What’re you doing here?” The words were sticky and too big in his mouth and bled together on the way out.

“Oh, so you can speak,” Alfie said. “That’s a new development. Can’t say it’s  reassuring me much, though. This is my house, is what I’m doing here.”

“Fuck,” he managed. It came out a groan.

“Yeah, fuck,” Alfie agreed. And then, “Open your fucking eyes, Tommy. Keep them open.”

He was in Alfie Solomons’ guest room. They’d never fucked in here before, but there Alfie was, without any clothes, so--

“What’s...” Tommy swallowed again, his throat catching.

“Right, yeah, you’re probably thirsty.” Alfie sounded as if he’d just come through a long campaign and had sustained heavy losses. He disappeared for awhile and Tommy drifted, almost asleep, and then he was pulled upright a little on the pillows and a glass held to his mouth. He took a couple of careful sips of water.

“You’re fucking heavy, you know that?”

then

“You got any of it with you?”

He might’ve missed something because he didn’t know what Alfie was talking about, but at least Alfie was wearing shorts now. The nakedness had confused him, the way it contrasted with the tension running through the other man as if he was about to lead the charge on an enemy redoubt without enough ammunition.

“Your medication, Tommy. Could be bromide, but my guess is they’ve got you on Luminal. Back in your hotel room, maybe?”

It took him a long time to understand what medication Alfie might mean. He shook his head. He didn’t actually remember if he did or not.

“Didn’t think so,” Alfie said to himself. “Fuck me. Alright, I know someone. Stay here. Not that you’re up for anything else.”

He had to concentrate and shape each word individually before releasing it. “Alfie. What’s happened?”

Alfie paused, his face folded into an expression Tommy couldn’t read. “We’ll talk about that in a bit, mate, because right now you’re not altogether with me, are you, and you’re probably just going to--”

* * *

When he woke again he was back on his side, piled with blankets, and Alfie was sitting in the chair, fully dressed this time, reading another one of the terrible novels he’d clearly rescued from a trash heap. He couldn’t focus enough to read the title. The light coming through the curtains was turning the room gold, so it was probably late afternoon.

He must have tried to move, because Alfie lowered the book to his lap.

“You need to eat before you take this?” Alfie held something up. “You probably need to eat something anyway, all that fucking exertion, but the more pressing question is whether food is required for this particular medication.” It was too much. Alfie sighed. Spoke more slowly. “Tommy, do you take your drugs with food?”

Tommy squinted, but without his glasses the label on the bottle was a blur. He recognized it well enough though, by the shape.

“No,” he said. He didn’t actually remember if he needed to eat first or not. “Why?”

The last time Tommy had seen that look on the other man’s face, he’d knocked the teeth out of one of Billy Kitchen’s men with his cane. Alfie stood and left the room.

Tommy pushed himself up against the pillows a little. Under the blankets he was naked.

Shit.

The last thing he remembered clearly was the horses, but it was easy enough to put together: the horses had most likely been yesterday.

Alfie came back some time later carrying a pile of Tommy’s clothing, which he dumped on the end of the bed.

Probably, Tommy should apologize. “What happened?” he asked instead.

Alfie sat back down again, the bottle of Luminal still in his hands. “I think you know what happened.”

If there was anything more disconcerting than Alfie this brief and to the point, Tommy couldn’t bring it to mind.

His head still ached and at the same time felt hollow, not quite attached to him. Moving his body was like trying to steer one of Charlie Strong’s heavier barges through a narrow canal while overloaded with contraband.

“So you’re looking for specifics, is that it?” Beneath the beard, Alfie’s mouth was a thin line. “This has been a lark, Tommy, but I like my fucks conscious.”

That’s what he’d thought had happened. Jesus.

“This the first time during sex?” Alfie asked. He didn’t seem curious, more like he needed something to say that wouldn’t immediately lead to shouting. When Tommy didn’t answer, he nodded. “That’s… you’re a bloody terrorist, you know that, right? What, you went into convulsions on some poor working girl? I hope you at least tipped her afterwards.”

So he’d spooked Alfie Solomons. Tommy didn’t know what to do with that fact. Shocking him into silence with his hands and his mouth had been a game, one that snuffed out the incessant noise in his own head to boot. Shocking him into angry concern, or whatever this fucking was--

“Could have dealt with the first one. I mean it was… a surprise, okay, yeah, didn’t see it coming, but it wasn’t so bad after I got out the way before you could break my fucking nose.”

Tommy scrubbed at his eyes. Wished for the armor of his glasses.

“Yeah, Tommy, the first one.” A muscle along Alfie’s jaw was jumping. “Because there was two this time, one after the other, and they both lasted a good long while. So either you need a higher dose of this shit, or you’re not taking it at all. I know which horse I’d put my money on.”

He didn’t have a response for any of it. Alfie sat glaring at him for another moment before shaking out a white pill from the bottle of Luminal.

“Guy I know said this might stop it from happening again, because if it happens again today it would be very bad for you. But he also said I should put you in an ambulance before you seized yourself into your grave, so there we are.”

Alfie handed him the pill and the glass of water.

“Why didn’t you?” It was more a reflex than a real need for an answer. The pill was small in his hand, the glass of water already getting too heavy to lift.

“I know you don’t remember this, mate, but we was naked in my bed and it was very fucking obvious what we’d been up to before--” Alfie broke off and waved his hand. “Yeah. Hard to dress a man who’s flopping around like that, innit. By time you’d turned fucking blue I nearly called them anyway, despite the odds we’d both go down for sodomy rather than any of our other more deserving crimes, but then it stopped.”

Tommy swallowed the pill. Alfie took the glass from him.

“You should also know, besides enjoying it better when they’re awake, I’m not in the habit of playing nursemaid to anyone I fuck, either. And I’m certainly not interested in burying them.”

“Burning.” The pill hadn’t had time to work but he was already sliding back into a hazy doze. He couldn’t hold his head up and he was cold under the blankets.

Alfie’s forehead wrinkled, like Tommy's words had made him reconsider his decision not to call the ambulance. “What?”

“When I’m dead,” Tommy said. “They’ll burn me.” 

“Fuck,” Alfie said to himself. He used his cane to push himself to standing and left the room.

Tommy struggled upright and grabbed his undershirt from the tangled pile of clothes at the foot of the bed. He might as well have been propping up the whole of Camden Town, the effort it took to lift his arms enough to pull the shirt over his head. He had to stop then, already done in. He was asleep again before he could reach for his shorts.

* * *

Alfie had left the glass of water on a bedside table and the next time Tommy woke he could hold it long enough to drain it down, desperately thirsty. All his insides had been scraped out without any supporting scaffolding and tremors were running through him and it was familiar, this sensation, but not recently so. He didn’t remember a lot from after they’d dug themselves free and the actual digging was also a blur that only came back to him focused and fractured in dreams but it had taken days and they hadn’t had anything to eat well before the earth had come down on them all. Mostly he remembered he hadn’t been able to hold a spoon and someone had fed him and he’d been too exhausted for pride by that point, just swallowed what they’d given him. It had taken near a week before he could stand again. Then they’d sent him back.

He’d lost track of what day it was. The sensation of time skipping ahead without waiting for him to catch up should have left him more than vaguely twitchy under the skin, but the drug had muffled things until he felt very distanced from it all, which in turn only bothered him in an abstract way that was too easy to ignore.

Alfie eventually returned carrying a tray with two soft boiled eggs and a cup of tea with too much milk and sugar in it, and it was jarring, being served in bed by the man who’d sold him out to the Economic League for a chance at a Faberge egg. Judging from how the windows had gone dark, it was evening already. He could feed himself this time, at least. Tommy methodically ate his eggs and drank his tea while Alfie sat in silence next to the bed. It seemed he’d discovered another way to render the man speechless.

“When’re you due home, then?” Alfie asked, finally.

“Tonight, I think,” Tommy said. “If it’s Friday.”

Alfie huffed. “Yeah, it’s Friday,” was all he said. Then: “Don’t think you’ll be making your train, mate.”

He managed to stay awake a little longer that time. He hadn’t had to take a piss and though the logistics of how that would happen if he’d needed to were something he wasn’t too keen on working out, he knew it was a bad sign. There wasn’t much he could do about it but drink the water Alfie brought him.

Alfie was talking to him about molasses and Tommy had only a muddled sense of how the subject had cropped up in the first place, but for a while he just listened, until eventually the entire thread of the monologue escaped him.

“You seem to know a lot about this.” Tommy gestured towards his own head.

Alfie paused, frowning. “Yeah, well, I need to, don’t I, for the rum.” It took him another moment of peering at Tommy, then: “Oh.” He fell silent, giving Tommy a sidelong gaze he wasn’t sure how to interpret. “Not the only one with brothers, are you,” he finished finally.

Tommy didn’t press for more. The suits in the wardrobe hadn’t been Alfie’s size or taste, and they’d been at least five years out of fashion.

* * *

This time he woke gasping, dirt in his mouth.

It was familiar. He sat up, coughing, and when he could breathe again he recognized the dim outlines of Alfie’s guest room in the dark. There was a shifting of fabric next to him and a soft sound, and when he turned he found Alfie heavily asleep in the chair with his cane resting between his legs, face slack and open in a way it never was while awake. He looked unwell. It wasn’t as if Tommy hadn’t noticed the way he’d grown more and more sallow over the years since they’d met, or how he’d started out using the cane mostly to make a point and now leaned heavily on the thing when he walked. Tommy wasn’t the only one afflicted, maybe, with some uncontrollable deterioration of his body.

It made him uncomfortable, considering Alfie Solomons as a human being with human frailties. A man with brothers, even. Better when they’d limited things to outwitting each other. Better when they’d kept to fucking. Better for business that way. Losing an entire day, rendered unaware for hours while Alfie of all people kept his fucked up brain from doing him in, it was too far over a line he hadn’t realized was there. Since his failure to kill Hughes his own body had betrayed him in ways he didn’t know how to reconcile, so mostly he’d ignored it, but that hadn’t exactly worked out in his favor, now, had it. And here they were.

He thought he couldn’t possibly sleep more, especially after Alfie started snoring, but his body had other ideas.

* * *

By the next morning he could stand under his own power. Just.

It was Shabbat, Alfie told him, so there was no one to drive him to the train station. Tommy couldn’t tell if Alfie really was that observant of his faith or if he doubted Tommy could make it back to Birmingham the state he was in or if he had some other as yet opaque motivation. But it had been too much, the parts he remembered and the parts he didn’t. Besides, he’d been away from Charlie since Wednesday, so he just told Alfie he understood and called a taxi to take him back to his hotel, where he paid someone to pack his things for him and then to drive him to the train station and then when he arrived in Birmingham, his usual driver was waiting.

David had driven him to London while his brain leaked down his neck, so he wasn’t a man easily shaken by his employer’s weaknesses, thankfully. Because by the time he got to New Street station Tommy’s already depleted reserves were pressed beyond their limits. David retrieved his bag and took his arm and helped him into the car and said nothing about the fact that Tommy wasn’t up to walking any longer.

He needed a drink, and his flask had gone missing. When he asked, David gave him a sidelong look but handed him the flask out of his own jacket pocket. He kept himself awake on the drive back to Warwickshire by asking David about his children and soon enough the man was pulling up to the door of Arrow House, and he and Frances somehow got Tommy inside and up to his room. Frances brought Charlie to him and he finally fell asleep again with his son sitting in the bed next to him, chattering at him about the horses.

That night he took his fucking medication.

* * *

A month went by and he made no plans to go back to London and when a telegram from Camden Town came to his office another fortnight after that -- PRIZE FIGHT. NEXT FRIDAY. ATTENDANCE OPEN TO ANY LEFT AMONG THE LIVING -- he didn’t respond.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Feist’s “The Wind” from Pleasure.
> 
> This was written mostly to Feist's albums Pleasure and Metals, which I'm obsessed with. There was also a bit of PJ Harvey, from Uh Huh Her (especially The Slow Drug) and other albums.
> 
> I've done a decent bit of internet research but most likely there are details that I got wrong. If you catch anything please do let me know.
> 
> I haven't actually read the penny dreadful mentioned by title here, just read a brief description, so if it is racist or terrible in some way please also let me know.
> 
> Tommy's opinions about Alfie's reading materials are definitely snobbery. LOL.
> 
> I don't know if fics need a PSA but uh depending on what it is stopping your medication cold turkey (or mixing it with Shelby amounts of booze) is usually bad. This fic is clearly not an endorsement of any terrible way of treating your body that Tommy Shelby engages in, heh.


End file.
